Emerald Repard-Denniston

On the opposite wall, Emerald Repard Denniston's body of work is spread across the bend of the gallery. The paintings' uncanny, sweeping scenes lure the viewer's eye, revealing endless plotlines on the horizon, ultimately bearing witness to the artist's traversal of psychological terrain following her first reunion with her birth family. Her collection of paintings— three large-scale works and three smaller pieces offers visual expressions of a liminal space where her inner world meets, merges, and exists in unison with life-altering memories. Adopted from China as an infant, Repard Denniston reflects on the surreal experience of meeting the family she had long envisioned-figures who, for much of her life, only existed in her 'ghost kingdom.' This term, coined by adoption advocate Betty Jean Lifton, describes the imagined world created by adoptees, where projections of lost or wished-for family members reside as unrealized figures, shaping identity in their absence. Now, a year after their reunion, Repard Denniston's birth family have become real, formative presences-central figures in the ongoing reconstruction of her self-understanding, both as a vessel and as a spirit moving through the many worlds she inhabits. The artist's body of work illustrate moments during her first return home, rendered with the emotional weight of memory-her family gathered around a lazy Susan sharing a meal, fireworks illuminating the sky before her childhood home, and intimate perspective of seeing the street where she was born for the first time.

Crossing Over depicts the artists family atop an iceberg adrift in a chaotic sea, creating a palpable tension in the painting: the world above, grounded in lived reality, hovers just shy of contact with what lies beneath—an equally consequential realm: the artists inner world, shaped by her ghost kingdom and the lurking persistence of her hauntings. These figures follow her into The Lady or the Tiger-her ghost mother, with an open wound, cries on the street where the artist entered the world. The apocalyptic darkness of the painting screams into a deafening silence, leaving a raw, unspoken grief that lingers like the shadows of creatures on the buildings. Many of these creatures and forms emerged directly from her sketchbook, drawn during the time of her reunion. The three smaller works, Eating the Other, Eating the Self, and Betwixt and Between, offer a contained space where these presences can exist in a kind of tangled convergence ghosts interwoven with the emotional residue of retrospection, fragments of lost lines, and unresolved shapes that Repard Denniston is still in the process of placing in her memory.

In Welcome Home To My Ghost Kingdom, the artist's extended family is depicted in unison, brushed in golden yellow against a red backdrop-colours deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. The painting meditates on that first encounter, where the artist stands among generations of relatives on the land they have dwelled for generations. They imagined who she might be, just as many other Chinese families had imaged their lost children during the era of the One Child Policy. The dreamt versions of one another collide with reality, under the same sky, now filled with light, listening to the same sounds echo through the place that has awaited her return. As the viewer moves through the gallery, their interactions with the works carry them across an elusive landscape that connects individuals across time, space, and relationships. The artists invite us into places that honour the act of remembering, where stories are shared, preserved, and passed down, and the boundaries between past and present dissolve. The works urge us not merely to observe, but to feel—to inhabit the space between what is seen and what is remembered, discovering ourselves within the folds of these collective narratives.

- Serene Mitchell